Re: [Exim] message_size_limit and error-messages

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Author: Sven Callender
Date:  
To: Jeffrey Goldberg
CC: Philip Hazel, Exim Users
Subject: Re: [Exim] message_size_limit and error-messages

On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

> On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Philip Hazel wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Sven Callender wrote:
> >
> > > Now the Management has had a new idea: Exim shall send a Message to
> > > the original recipent telling him/her that a message was "blocked" due
> > > to the size.
> >
> > That shouldn't be necessary. If Exim has refused a message because of
> > the size, whatever was trying to send the message to Exim should be the
> > thing that constructs the error message and sends it back.
>
> I think that the question was to inform the recipients, not the sender,
> who will get an appropriately generated bounce. It appears that the
> management want mail that says something like
>
>   "Someone tried to send you mail, but it didn't get through because the
>    sender probably thinks that MS-Word or PowerPoint are reasonable
>    document exchange formats.  Now do you really want to be getting mail
>    from such idiots anyway?"

>
> or something like that, if I've understood the original message.


Yep, thats what they want.

> Anyway, what they want is hard because most size rejections should happen
> very early if I understand correctly, because the client could respond
> intellegently to the SIZE reported by the initial EHLO. In that case,
> there will be no information that exim has to do anything with.


It should not send a size reply, because only the one transport wich
sends it on (one of multiple) has got a size limit, the other transports
and the local deliverys shall be able to get big mails.
So I think this behavior
---
bash-2.02# telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 asturias.rz.uni-frankfurt.de ESMTP Exim 2.11 #1 Thu, 23 Sep 1999
14:24:57 +0200
ehlo asturias
250-asturias.rz.uni-frankfurt.de Hello localhost [127.0.0.1]
250-SIZE
250-PIPELINING
250 HELP
---
is right.
This should mean that I get every mail into the machine and
onto the disk completly before it is processed further (and then
when it is in the transport it gets rejected) [.|?]


> Other size rejections (which really should be the minority if I
> understand) will happen late so that at least exim has the information.
> The information needed (recipients) is, I believe, logged in the
> exim_rejectlog. Still I doubt that there is a way, even for these, to do
> what you want (or what your bosses want) directly in exim. Best bet would
> be to run a script that reads the reject log and generates mail from that.
> But that seems pointless in the light of the fact that you'll only get a
> small portion of size rejected messages. Or am I mistaken about how the
> SIZE stuff works? (Sorry, I haven't actually read the relevant RFCs, I'm
> just guessing from what I think make sense.)


As Exim (as it seems) gets all Mails, it should know about them all.
Also it doesn't but anything in the rejectlog, but only in the mainlog (as
i quoted before).

Cu,
Sven